A Good then Awful Day

We finished most of what we can do on the shower today, exactly one week since we arrived in Florida for the winter.  We made one discovery that changed our calculations a little, and we took one risk, but in the end everything turned out well.

We knew that we wanted to enclose the "pocket door" wall before we built the inner frame which will hold the shower tile.  Our first trip of the day to Lowe's brought home 2 x 4s, other needed lumber, and some drywall. Rick added lumber on the back wall so that the tilers had something on which to attach the backer board.  Then up went the first layer: the drywall on the north wall of the shower.  So far, so good.

Phase one: the new drywall encloses the pocket
door wall.

One discovery that we made was that the original floor of the shower was not square to the corner of the house.  The picture below shows that the front of the threshold of the original shower was off by about 3/4 of an inch.  We will make sure that our new threshold is much more square!

Our level and a rule show that the outline of the old shower
enclosure is "off" a bit from square.

One way to assure the new threshold would be square was to make sure that the new frame we built for the north wall matched the outline of the old shower wall on the south wall. We took a second trip to Lowe's for more 2 x 4s since we ended up with a couple short.  We took a risk by trying (and succeeding) to build the wall frame within the confines of the bathroom itself.  With a little manipulations, the new wall is up, complete with an additional board between the first two boards to support the glass shower doors we eventually will hang to enclose the new structure.

The new north wall will support the tile and
our new glass shower door.

At this point, we have only the fan to install and the new ceiling to add. That will have to wait for another day.  We both are tired: Rick because he worked really hard, and me because a little work seems to tire me greatly.  I am not sure that the medication I am on right now should be reduced anymore.  I may be on the lowest dose I can tolerate.

We need to tape and mud a small strip of wall next to the new frame we built today, but that will not be a large chore. Then we can do nothing more but wait for the tile to come in. Then plumbers and our tile contractor will take over the completion of this shower.  We still need to select a glass wall/ door for the front; however, we have two places that we have chosen as possible suppliers, so we will have a couple of weeks to find the right fit.

This afternoon did not go as well.  We received an e-mail that our application for a fence permit was rejected.  After a trip downtown to the permit office, Rick and I both left angry.  It turns out that his hours upon hours of CAD drawings were fine, but they would not approve the permit because he said that the fence would be 3 inches off the property line.  They interpreted that as meaning we were going to intentionally build our fence 3 inches onto the neighbor's property rather than 3 inches inside our own property limits. How in the world could they be so stupid as to think that WE would be stupid enough to intentionally tell them we were planning on breaking the law.  Ridiculous! The dimensions, if they had checked them, would have shown that our fence would be within our property by 3 inches all the way around.  But nope, what we had submitted was not good enough.  They needed things more simply done, perhaps so that their simple minds could interpret what we submit.  We're both done with even thinking about the fence for now.  For the money that we saved for a fence, we could have one hell of a beautifully landscaped yard, and we could do that for much less effort on our part.  We'll have to revisit this later.